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Back Wild Swims Save as PDF
Chapters (21)
  1. Praise
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. CONTENTS
  5. IN A DEER STAND
  6. SUN DOGS
  7. HYGGE
  8. BY SYDVEST STATION
  9. BETWEEN OFFICES
  10. THE FAIRGROUND
  11. COMPACTION BIRDS
  12. PERSHING SQUARE
  13. HONEYSUCKLE
  14. ON NARROW PAVED PATHS
  15. INSIDE ST. PAUL’S
  16. THE FREEZER CHEST
  17. MANITOBA
  18. WILD SWIMS
  19. PUSHKIN PRESS
  20. ALSO BY DORTHE NORS
  21. COPYRIGHT

A stray ice cream wrapper, over there on the lot, and now a ringdove worming its way through the grass. Empty, she thinks, and I who am so full of things. My doll carriage was pigeon blue, and I decorated it with daisies. We started at the school, and then we marched in procession to the fairground. It smelled of barbecue and dry grass. The parents and teachers ran after us with their cameras, while the boys from school stayed away. I wonder where they were, the boys, as we walked there, a model of compliance. Were they playing soccer, or throwing abandoned bikes into the creek?​53

She cocks an ear to the evening sky, listening. No boys in the bushes. No boys on the fairground, they’re gone, and she tries to make herself taller in order to see it more clearly. The fox is not there, and it’s good that the ringdove flies off, for now she is standing on the brink. It’s September. In the yard hang apples and black elderberries. Someone’s placed a good chair under the chestnut, she could just sit down, but she’d rather stand here with the gas can. It’s so quiet, now that everyone’s gone home.54

55

COMPACTION BIRDS

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EARLY SATURDAY MORNING I DROVE UP THE COAST from the border, toward Thy. I drove past meadows with flocks of game birds. The geese don’t want to migrate anymore. They think it’s just as easy to stay in the farmers’ fields, so now they hunker there through the winter by the thousand, feeding on winter wheat and old corncobs. They trample, they compact the soil and make it hard.

As I stood on the ferry, crossing the Thyborøn Channel, I was thinking that it was a long way to drive for a woman I’d only spent a single night with. But Anja had been nice when she was waiting on us during the seminar in the national park. She’d wanted to join the dancing after dinner and seemed eager as we walked through the crowberry. She didn’t want to do it in the hotel, but there’d been primitive shelters in the area. My performance hadn’t been that impressive, yet now her ex-husband had the kids for the weekend. And she had the family summer cottage.

“Come,” she’d whispered on the phone.

There’s a powerful riptide in the Limfjord. I had to grip the railing tightly on the trip across. The fjord looked as though it were a river flowing toward the North Sea, and up on the Agger Isthmus I saw how everything that no longer had to fly away lay pooling in the lakes, and if she hadn’t been standing​ 58in the lyme grass by the driveway to a cottage a little farther north, I might well have stayed.

“But here I am,” I said as I stepped into the dunes to greet her.